Wednesday, October 26, 2016

COPASI is released on Linux as a zipped tarball, to make it as easy as possible to get started with it. You simply extract it and run the executables. However, sometimes that is not enough, or if you don't like to launch your programs from the command line, then you want an alternative. Even worse some distributions launch the CopasiUI shell script in an editor, rather than the application instead.

So enough! Here you will find a shell script that you invoke once, and once done it generates a COPASI.desktop file that your Distribution ought to pick up and launch for you.

(choose right click and save, should your browser not download the file) make it executable:

chmod +x create-copasi-icon.sh

and run it with the location where you placed your COPASI installation (and where you will leave it). Say you downloaded COPASI-4.16.104-Linux-64bit and placed it in your home directory, where you want it to stay, then you'd run:

./create-copasi-icon.sh ~/COPASI-4.16.104-Linux-64bit

The script will print the full path of the file it generated, and so if you don't like the results you could simply delete it right away. No other files on your systems will be touched.

Once the script ran, you can go to your application launcher of choice (or simply launch your super key aka windows key) and type COPASI. You should find the COPASI icon right there waiting for you. Let me know (with the name of your linux distro & version) if it does not.

Uninstalling the icon

If at any other point you would like to remove the file you can simply remove the desktop file via:

Friday, September 16, 2016

Today (and just in time for the COMBINE meeting next week) I released the first version of a C++ library supporting the COMBINE archive. The primary purpose of this release is to gather feedback about the API and look what additional features people might need from it. To get a glimpse at what is possible right now you could have a look at:

Thursday, May 8, 2014

We have just updated the libSBML standalone python package, both on PyPI as well as on the Open Build Service. This includes a critical bug fix, when reading SBML Level 3 files using approved packages.
The new versions are available immediately from PyPI, and can be installed by running

pip install python-libsbml

or

pip install python-libsbml-experimental

if you need all packages. Otherwise linux binaries are available from OBS:

Saturday, April 19, 2014

We have just released a new version of COPASI, and I just wanted to call out my favorite features in this release:

We have re-implemented the Rendering backend for network diagrams in Qt and improved the navigation and export of them. That means that all files containing an SBML file supporting the SBML Layout Package and / or the SBML Render Package will displayed properly and could for example be exported as PDF.

The same rendering code can now also be used to provide visualization of results for tasks. In this release we just exposed the display of time course results, conserved species, or elementary flux modes. For this visualization the existing rendering information will be altered and not replaced as you can see in the small recording below. Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

If you would like to compare, you can switch between the different visualization types, by choosing in the COPASI preferences (Tools/Preferences, or the Preference menu on OSX) to select “Use OpenGL” and give it the Value “YES”.

While you are in the Preference menu, have a look at the option “Use Advanced Editing” I encourage you to try it out! If enabled, you can free-type expressions in all the places, where COPASI allows you to enter infix expressions as in for example Event Triggers / Assignments. It also makes it possible to copy expressions from one place to another, something that was not possible before.

Speaking about Events, there is a new option in the Time Course Task: “Continue on Simultaneous Events”. Before when two events would be competing and trigger at the same time, COPASI would always interrupt the simulation to make you aware of the fact. By enabling the option, you will just be warned, rather than the simulation stopped. This option is automatically enabled when SBML files are imported. It will not be automatically when opening / creating COPASI files (as it would be a change in behavior as compared to previous versions).

SED-ML support: COPASI now has limited support for SED-ML. It is possible to export the Time Course Simulation Task, along with Plots, as well as steady state parameter scans. Other files supporting the same feature set (SED-ML L1V1 / L1V2 without model pre-processing and local SBML sources) can also be imported.

The full release announcement is as always on sbml-discuss. Here I would just like to call out a number of changes in this release:

We were able to fix a number of memory leaks within libSBML, and would recommend everyone to upgrade.

There is now an extensible ASTNode layer implemented, that can be used to add additional math to the set understood by libsbml. This is primarily of importance for SBML Level 3 packages like ‘arrays’ and ‘multi’ that extend math. If your software tool does not use these packages, and is not extending math, then you can use the ‘old’ implementation by specifying the cmake option ‘LIBSBML_USE_LEGACY_MATH’.

The CMake build no longer modifies any files within the source directory, and so it is finally possible to have differently configured build directories side-by-side.

It is possible to influence precisely how comp-flattening influences each element in the flattening process. This is made possible by passing along a custom transformer class that will be called on each element by libSBML.

The CMake files have also been updated, so that it is possible for others to include the libSBML sources anywhere within their cmake projects and simply add libSBML as subdirectory to their project. All that needs to be done to make this work, is to set CMake variables to the root of the libSBML sources and the root of the libSBML build directory.

We have solved several issues with respect to compatibility with OSX Mavericks. The only remaining issue, is that when you install the standalone python packages, you will get an error as the python distutils are pretty much broken with Apples switch to Clang. For now you will have to define the ARCHFLAGS environment variable to include: ‘ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future’.